BITLLES development
Since computers are considerably cheaper than trial-and-error manufacturing process, simulation is an indispensable tool to test hypothetical devices and to offer unique insight into device behavior by allowing the observation of phenomena that can not be measured on real devices. Dragica Vasileska and Stephen M. Goodnick, 2005
The Monte Carlo technique applied to the solution of the Boltzmann equation, has been the most successful simulation tool chosen for the international scientific community to simulate microelectronic devices during last 30 years for several and well-founded reasons. It provides a strictly accurate solution of the Boltzmann equation through an intuitive picture of the dynamics of electrons in terms of trajectories. It is also a very versatile technique used as a "simulated experiment" to save costs and efforts in the development of prototypes.
However, the Boltzmann equation is not able to directly include the relevant quantum effects in nanoscale structures and the scientific community is doing an important effort to developed many “quantum” simulators to deal with quantum and/or atomistic structures as required in the "More Moore" and "Beyond CMOS" domains.
Nowadays, there is no “quantum” electron simulator in the scientific community that includes Coulomb and exchange correlations among electrons, correlation among electrons and atoms (i.e. the “band structure” beyond the effective mass) and a time-dependent scheme. This situation clearly needs to be improved. If not, our predicting capabilities for emerging nanos cale and atomistic devices will be severely limited (much more limited than it was for the semi-classical predicting capabilities of microelectronic). This limitation will certainly hypothecate, in particular, the exponential growing of the electronics industry and, in general, the progress of our society since electronics is a “catalyser” for the evolution of almost the rest of industries (automobile, aeronautics, informatics, telecommunications, military industry, domotics, etc…).
See practicals applications of the BITLLES simulator in Nanoelectronics and some Video_animations.
Once completelly finished, we will bring the BITLLES simulator to the scientific communty for its public use. A beta version is already FREE available at: http://europe.uab.es/bitlles